Tough Plants - Just Throw 'Em and Grow 'Em

Many of us plant things with some trepidation, afraid that the slightest misstep on our part will end up as a planticide. As if there are unbreakable rules, gathered from the collective wisdom of the ages that must be followed before we merit a glorious garden.

But we really underestimate our plants when we think that way. Like people, most plants have a very strong will to live. You would be amazed at what a plant can survive if it has made up its mind that it wants to bloom and grow. In fact, some plants are so eager to grow that you don't even have to plant them to see them start flowering. A classic example is the autumn bulb called colchicum, which sometimes flower while sitting on the table waiting to go into the ground. I've also seen amaryllises so eager to strut their stuff that they push open the lid of the supermarket container and send the flowering stalk upward.

At least the amaryllis is properly planted in dirt.

For a long time I thought the colchicum was a miracle. Then I started noticing something strange in my own garden.

The first odd thing was a common orange daylily, growing and blooming right next to the house. Now I never planted a daylily there. In fact, I have no need to plant orange daylilies as the house came ready equipped with a 40' row of them running along the edge of the main yard.

I did remember dropping a daylily there. One of my neighbors had asked me if I wanted some of her tiger lilies and I eagerly said yes. I had planted only two of them when this nasty suspicion overtook me. I went across the lawn to the 40' row of Hemerocallis fulva and compared the foliage. Disappointment came quickly. No Liliums these - they were Hemerocallis - the same orange ditch lilies that I already had in overabundance.

I carried the rest of my booty to the compost heap, dropping one on the way. And there it remains, five years later - only now it is a nice, big clump of flowering, spreading, unplanted daylilies. It didn't even blink when a backhoe jostled it digging the greenhouse foundation.

But then the rosebush that came with our property has twice been run over by heavy machinery - a bulldozer and whatever they use to drill wells - and every time it has reacted as thought it had been groomed by a master pruner.

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